E 

458 

,4 

S%7 





Class __&Ji_ 

.4 
Book s^ 



» 



REV. DR. STONE'S 



FAST DAY SERMON 



APRIL 7, 1864 



NATIONAL GODLINESS. 



SERMON, 

PREACHED IN PARK STREET CHURCH, 



ON OCCASION OF THE 



ANNUAL STATE FAST, 



APRIL 7, 1864. 



BY 

REV. A. L. STONE, D. D, 



InbliB^tij bg ^ecinest. 



BOSTON; 

PRESS OF T. R. MARVIN & SON. 42 CONGRESS STREET. 
18 64. 



r4sf 

. 4 



SERMON 



JEREMIAH IV. 1, 2. 

If thou wilt return, Israel, saith the Lord, return unto me ; and if 
thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight, then shalt thou not 
remove. And thou shalt swear. The Lord liveth in truth, in judgment, and 
in righteousness, and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and in him 
shall they glory. 

The object of this day, appointed in accordance 
with ancient New England custom for public 
humiliation and prayer, is to bring us as a people 
penitently and suppliantly to God. If the obser- 
vance of this day is justly and truly to brighten 
our national hopes and national prospects, it must 
be by quickening us to acknowledge in all our 
national affairs the supremacy of the Most High. 

Godliness is the great want of this nation, 
and that is the idea I wish now to impress upon 
our minds and hearts. 

We have intelligence enough. At least never 
before with any people was knowledge so generally 
diffused among all classes. We have enough of 
personal liberty, liberty of thought, of speech, of 
conscience, of published creeds and forms of 
worship, of secular pursuits and private enterprise. 
There is nowhere else a people governed with so 



little law and so simple a police. We have, with 
the exception of one doomed and decaying Institu- 
tion, enough of political and social equality. We 
have room enough, and enough of natural and 
acquired wealth — of enterprise and public spirit. 
Enough perhaps of loyalty and patriotism, quite 
enough of self-confidence and self-reliance — but 
we want more of God. 

I might ask you who hear me now, to say 
frankly whether the statement of this want does 
not sound vague and mystical, whether it suggests 
to you any definite idea of deficiencies to be 
lamented and benefits to be sought, whether it does 
not seem remote, impractical, possibly absurd. 

We began our national life with God — but since 
that devout beginning we have drifted away from 
him. With him our fathers embarked in their 
frail little fleet on the shore of the Old World, 
with him they sailed over the wintry sea, with 
him they framed their first charter of government, 
in the cabin of the Mayflower. (How full of God 
was that compact then and there subscribed ! It 
begins : " In the name of God, Amen." And then 
after giving their earthly king his titles, it goes on 
to say : " having undertaken, for the glory of God 
and advancement of the Christian faith," — this 
voyage, &c., — we " do, by these presents, solemnly 
and mutually, in the presence of God and one 
another, covenant and combine ourselves together 
unto a civil body politic") * * With him they 
landed and builded in the wilderness the rising 
walls of" a Christian State. Their legislation, 



their public instruments, their civil conventions, 
their State machinery, were all full of him. They 
were themselves godly men and women, they 
walked with God not alone in secret or before 
the altar of the home, but in their courts and 
statute books and town regulations, every where 
beneath human eyes and the all-beholding sun, 
they talked with God — they talked of him — not 
flippantly, and rhetorically, but reverently and 
practically as though there were nothing so real, 
so practical, so near, or with which they had so 
much to do as this unseen God. There were two 
invisible powers more solidly substantial to them 
than any thing which their eyes looked upon or 
their hands handled — God and the Devil. They 
believed in both. The supernatural was awfully vivid 
to them. Or rather their system of nature included 
the Infinite Creator and Governor, and the great 
malign one. There were two sides only in human 
character and conduct — God's side and the side of 
that spirit of all evil, rival of God and enemy of 
man. They were on God's side, and ready to fight 
the Devil at all points and in every shape, whether 
as Pope or Prelate, Infidel or Indian, Witch or 
Quaker. , 

They attempted nothing without invoking God 
to guide and to prosper. They neither plowed and 
sowed, nor reaped and gathered into barns — they 
neither journeyed, nor fought, without the offering 
of public prayers. They lived and moved and had 
their being in the midst of spiritual realities — the 
other world and all its forces intensely mixed with 
this. 



Nor did this make a weak and sickly character. 
Their piety was not a piece of delicate and retiring 
sentiment. It was rugged and athletic. It was 
not what some sweet secluded vale is to a land- 
scape — it was rather the mountain ridge rising 
centrally in that same landscape, large-boned, broad- 
backed, ribbed with rock, hiding in its recesses 
the springs that water the vale and make the 
vallies green, lifting its bareheaded cliffs defiant 
of storms. 

There never was a sterner and grander type of 
manhood on God's earth, that could endure more, 
dare more, achieve more, in dark and troublous 
times. We may have softened what we call their 
asperities, we cannot eclipse their heroism. Not 
afraid to take the Devil by the horns, encountering 
him as they thought almost bodily, they were not 
likely to run for any other terror. They feared (xod, 
and so they feared nothing else in the universe of 
God. 

We have come to speak more seldom and more 
shyly of God, and much more gingerly and 
politely of the great adversary. We treat the 
latter more as a myth — or as an impersonal element 
of evil — and the former as a Being too high and 
remote to be recognized in the homely working 
of our every day life. We are not so dependent 
in feeling and circumstances as we w^ere. The 
wilderness has become a fruitful field, or a great 
commercial city. The once threatening savage is 
a frontier exile, 'i'he little colony is a strong 
nation. We can take care of ourselves now. 



Then, we could not walk alone, and needed to hold 
by the Almighty finger. Now, who dare look 
saucily in our face "? With the sense of power 
has come in also the license of wealth and luxury. 
The old Puritan element has been diluted by the 
perpetual inflowing of other styles of population, 
new sovereigns that knew not Joseph nor the May- 
flower, nor Plymouth Rock, nor our forefathers' 
Rock of salvation, have come to have sway in 
legislation and public sentiment and court man- 
ners, and not God now, but another, has become 
our tutelar deity — that other of whom our noblest 
epic sings, 

" Mammon — the least erected spirit that fell 
From Heaven ; for e'en in heaven his looks and thoughts 
Were always downward bent, admiring more 
The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold, 
Than aught divine or holy, else enjoy' d 
In vision beatific." 

We have not named God in the organic instru- 
ment of our national life. We have put this God- 
less Constitution above the throne supreme. We 
have scoff'ed at " Higher Laws." We have perjured 
ourselves in oaths of allegiance. We have trodden 
the image of our Creator beneath our feet, and 
have kept back the hire of the laborer in our 
fields, and have practically said : " How doth God 
know, and is there knowledge with the Most 
High ? " Our great cities have become dens of 
iniquity ; our popular elections, scenes of intrigue 
and corruption ; our most dignified halls of legisla- 
tion, theatres of bribery and violence ; the career 
of public men, a scramble for office and spoils ; 



8 

party interest, instead of the pnblic good the 
inspiration of oratory and the bond of unity ; and 
the ancient virtues of the commonwealth, fading 
memorials of the past. 

Is this statement too strong? I do not make 
it as universally true. There are noble exceptions 
individual and local. The State papers of this 
Commonwealth are delivered from the sin of Athe- 
ism. In respect to tlie recognition of God, they are 
models worthy of all admiration. There are more 
than seven thousand that have not bowed the knee 
to Baal. We could paint another picture of evan- 
gelic truth and evangelic life, of pure and single- 
eyed patriotism and noble self-sacrifice, of the wide- 
spread sentiment of Christian charity blossoming 
out in fragrance and beauty amid all this visible 
corruption, this odor of the grave. And this picture 
should be true also. 

But the other is so true — true to such an extent, 
that we might accept it as our general indictment, 
repeat it to-day as our general confession, and 
cease to wonder why God has visited us as a 
nation with the sorest rod of his right hand, the 
dreadful scourge of civil war. 

He cannot bear that we should depart from him. 
He is readier with his discipline than if he had 
loved us less. He chose us and sifted us out of 
the nations and kingdoms to bear his name. He 
will not let us go astray without feeling the sharp 
stroke of his parental displeasure. Because he 
means to save us, he is dealing with us in the fliith- 
ful severities of his chastening providence. 



And thus he calls to us to-day, " Return unto 
me; if thou wilt put away thine abominations out 
of my sight, then shalt thou not remove." — And 
he commands us to frame this charter for our 
future, and to make sacramental oath over it. 
" The Lord livetli in truth, in judgment and 
in righteousness, and the nations shall bless them- 
selves IN Him, and in Him shall they glory." 

If we heed this call, we must^ acknowledge God. 

1. In the first place we must acknowledge that 
He is. And this acknowledgment must be not a 
simple and half-contemptuous concession that it 
is well enough for religion to include such an 
article in its creed ; that on the whole whether true 
or not, it is a wholesome belief for the consciences 
of men, and safe for the nurture of children ; that it 
supplies a convenient and rather impressive legal 
formula when men, not otherwise credible or offici- 
ally trustworthy, are put under oath. It must be 
a hearty, downright, practical, public belief that 
there is a God, that that holy and fearful name 
is not an empty sound : that there is a Being 
who claims it as his own, and watches every utter- 
ance of it, and looks to see what homage it has 
in the hearts and on the lips of men : that he is 
the Bible-God — such a Being as is there set forth — 
a Spirit, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent: 
that he is a jealous God, jealous for the honor 
that is his due, for the sovereignty that is his 
right — of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and 
that will by no means clear the guilty. Every 
man's conscience ought to be diligently trained to 



» 10 

this sense of a present, holy, sm-hatmg God. 
Moralists ought to make their appeal more to this 
great truth ; reformers to gird themselves and 
their movements in its strength ; the public docu- 
ments of a Christian people, " Constitutions," 
" Proclamations " and " General Orders," distinctly 
and reverently to recognize it ; courts of law and 
legal decisions to embrace it; literature and art 
to pay it homage ; patriotism to take upon it this 
more sacred allegiance, and armies to go bannered 
by it, as they hasten to the dread executive work 
of battle, ^yith our founding and our history, 
this is the last nation in Christendom that ought 
to take an atheistical turn. The example of France 
is not too remote yet for our warning. What came 
of blotting out the name of God and substituting 
the trinity of liberty, license, and lust, that red- 
handed witness of the Eevolution, in garments drip- 
ping with blood, stands up before the nations to 
testify. Our spiritual teachers and guides must 
preach to us more of God. The morality that 
does not derive its life from him, however exquis- 
itely drawn and elocjuently commended, will soon 
have no life at all. Men will admire and praise 
it, and in the hour of insurgent passion, trample 
it under their feet. It is fair but not sacred — 
beautiful but not divine. God — his being — his 
attributes — his character — his will — must be held 
up, believed in, and enter into the whole life of a 
nation as a controlling idea and a present power, 
or that nation however great, prosperous and strong, 
underlies the doom of death. 



11 

2. Again God is to be acknowledged as provi- 
dential Governor of men and nations. To believe 
that He is, carries with it a certain sense of awe and 
of duty — but if we look upon him as sitting remote 
in some far-off central capital of his broad empire, 
on the outskirts of which our little planet twinkles 
with a light too small to be seen from heaven's 
battlements, that he sits within that imperial city, 
wrapt in the light and glory of his palace and 
court, listening only to the psalms of worship that 
breathe music like incense around his presence, he 
becomes to us in our personal and national affairs, 
the busy schemes and actings of the present life, 
scarce more than an ideal God, not practically 
feared or regarded. 

He has not just created and then retired from 
the earth, set nature a-going, like a clock wound 
up, and then left it to run by itself till it shall run 
down, made man and given him dominion over 
inanimate things and irrational life, and flung the 
reins upon his neck to let him go whither he will, 
with all that is intrusted to his care. We need 
not only to read that first line in a written revela- 
tion, " In the beginning God created the heavens 
and the earth," and that other line at its close, 
" I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on 
it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled 
away ; " but to turn to a central page and read 
there, " All the kindreds of the nations shall wor- 
ship before thee. For the kingdom is the Lord's, 
and He is the Governor among the nations." And 
then to open the early chronicles of the race to 



12 

Mhich so many chapters arc given, and see how 
amid those confused scenes of jostling and warring 
empires — changing dynasties — kingdoms overturn- 
ed, and proud cities hurned and drowned, a divine 
hand hehl the thread and kept the clue through 
all the tangle — the one controlling law of history, 
the divine purpose acting upon human Aoluntari- 
ness. What these inspired annals uncover upon 
that ancient stage and in that more primeval time 
is true always and everywhere — here and now. 

God is the God of creation and he is the God 
of providence. He has laid tlie plot of Earth's 
involved drama, and he secures the progressive 
development of a scheme that needs his hand as 
much in its evolution as his mind in its conception. 
He is present then as an actual ruler in the 
world's affairs, vigiLant, active, administrative. 
From behind the veil he sometimes shows his hand, 
and we are startled to see of a sudden how near he 
is and how controllingly he works. That man is 
blind who has not discovered the frequent appari- 
tion of that hand in the crowded events of the 
past three years on this soil, years whose chimes 
have tolled out to the universe more consummated 
divine plans than as many centuries in the earlier 
past. There is a throne in this land higher than 
the Presidential chair. It is God's throne and it 
is not vacant. There is a sovereignty more univer- 
sal and conclusive than ])opular sovereignty, and 
it is his who is excellent in counsel and wonderful 
in working. If we can only as a people accord 
that throne to God — concede to him that sover- 



13 

eignty, and feel that every human worker among 
us all touches with his shoulder that unseen divine 
worker and must take direction and impulse from 
him, all will be well. 

3. God is to be acknowledged, too, ivith fear. 
There is a fear of God that is most wholesome for 
men and nations. It grows out of right ideas of 
God, his character, his purposes, his government. 
It is salutary that in his sight the nations should 
know themselves to be but men — that they should 
not presume to set aside his will, and attempt 
schemes of their own which must be in contraven- 
tion of his. It is well that we should remember 
at how many points he can come in upon our 
national life with correction and chastisement, and 
teach us that it is better to have him as a friend 
than as an enemy. His quiver is full of arrows. 
The drought is his, and he sends it. He orders 
the blight and the mildew as easily as the dews of 
night. Pale famine is his messenger. The light- 
nings run, the storms fly at his bidding. Plague 
and pestilence wait before him. He lifts up with 
his breath the waves of the sea, and rends the 
solid land with the earthquake. He commissions 
the whirlwind and the devouring hail, and " casts 
forth his ice like morsels." He withdraws his 
hand, and the hot lava streams of war gush forth, 
and sweep through vineyard and harvest field, over 
cottage and town, desolating all. Can we seek 
independence of such a God, and hope to prosper. 
Can we ignore him by silent neglect, or defy him 
by willful rebellion, and expect peace and quietness 



u 

in our day ! '^ AVho shall not fear thee, O Lord, 
and glorify thy name ? " 

4. There is great occasion, also, that we ac- 
knowledge him with i^enitence. God has had 
a controversy with this nation. Let no man 
doubt that. Lmocent nations do not stoop to 
the earth under his heavy pressing hand. We 
have offended him and delayed his purposes, and 
refused obedience to his most express will, his 
most explicit command ; and therefore a cry has 
gone up from our midst like the wail of Egypt over 
her first-born, when in all the land there was not 
a house in which there was not one dead. " Undo 
the heavy burdens," said God's voice ; " let the 
oppressed go free; break every yoke." "We can't," 
said we in reply. " Our own hands are tied." 
Who had tied them? Not the fingers of God. 
Not one statute of his word. We ourselves. 
Could not they who tied untie % " Ah, we can't," 
we plead ; " it will cause disunion. AVe can't ; it 
will cost too much. We can't ; it isn't safe for the 
slave or his master. We can't ; no other labor can 
produce that on which we are growing rich, and 
which gives us our commercial importance with 
foreign powers." And so we sinned for fear of 
disunion, and God has shattered the Union. We 
sinned to save cost. Have we saved it? have we 
found our economy in such saving % We sinned 
to produce cotton. How is the crop now? We 
sinned for the sake of peace and quietness. Is 
this a tranquil land to-day ? We sinned with our 
hands bound as with new ropes that never were 



15 

occupied; and God has touched the cords, and 
they have become as flax burned with fire. 

In the midst of the strenuous tasks laid upon 
us, — tasks that absorb all hearts and employ all 
hands, that summon our boldest and bravest and 
strongest to the field, and double the burdens of 
the aged and weak left behind, — we must find 
time to humble ourselves before God, to acknowl- 
edge him just and right in this controversy, to 
confess that we have been wrong, and with a spirit 
of contrition, which he shall see to be deep and 
sincere, beseech restoration to his favor. By this 
path only can we find a way out of our troubles. 
Not as a suff'ering nation will he heal and exalt us, 
but only as a penitent nation. 

5. And even as we come with penitence before 
him, we may come with gratitude also. We cannot 
be penitent as we ought, without a discernment of 
the divine goodness. And tears of gratitude may 
mingle to-day with tears of sorrow, and psalms of 
thanksgiving with chants of confession. The 
hands that sought to tear down the majestic fabric 
of our Government, and to dismember our broad 
country, have not yet had their will. The panic 
hour of surprise, three years ago, was their hour. 
But that hour has passed. God shielded us in 
that day of weakness and doubt. He has breathed 
upon the national heart, and the passion of nation- 
ality has struck deep. A new-born love of country 
has shot up and ripened like a summer harvest, 
over all the breadth of the land. Among all 
parties, with only a few execrable exceptions. 



ir, 



doomed to eternal infamy, he has inspired the un- 
Hinching purpose to maintain the Government 
by force of arms upon the necks of rebels and 
traitors. He has guided the President slowly and 
cautiously forward, not so fast as some of us'were 
moved to go," but taking no step backward, and 
with such progress that the whole nation has kept, 
as we may say, even pace with him. He has filled 
our ranks with men, our treasury with money, our 
hearts with charity, our homes with plenty. He 
has given us friends abroad, and victories in the 
field, repressing the hostility of jealous foreign 
powers, and circumscribing rebellion within nar- 
rower limits. We are fasting to-day ; but it is not 
because God has brought us into deadly extremities ; 
so hedged up our way that we cannot take another 
step, and know not which way to turn ; not* because 
of defeat and slaughter, and the ravages of war 
rolling forward with threatening aspect toward our 
Xorthern homes ; not because we are despondent 
and cast down, hope dying out and courage un- 
nerved. In his great mercy the very opposite of 
all this is true. He has breathed within us hope, 
courage, determination. We seek him to acknowl- 
edge unworthiness in the midst of these favors, to 
express our dependence, to entreat his continued 
guidance and blessing, and that he lead us out of 
the bitterness and anguish of war; its terrible 
sacrifices ; its household griefs ; its disturbance of 
all those arts and pursuits that bless a nation -in 
time of peace ; its arrest of great spiritual enter- 
prises, and of our growing national life. And yet 



17 

thus seeking, we cannot but see that there may 
mingle with these very evils an occasion for thank- 
fulness. Perhaps our true life never had such 
rapid and vigorous nurture before. The true ends 
of a nation are not national wealth, political 
power and self-aggrandizement ; but to develop 
the noblest types of personal and social character ; 
to nurture in her sons the most exalted qualities ; 
to establish great principles worthily crowned with 
royalty over the individual heart and in the insti- 
tutions of a people ; to shake off sloth, the love 
of ease, the pursuit of luxury, and devotion to 
material interests, and to put on the stern virtues 
of self-denial and heroic endurance, and the bright 
loveliness of human charity. It may be that in 
this sense and toward these ends, our national 
progress was never so real and grand — our na- 
tional life never so full-pulsed and vigorous. 

And now once more, while mingling gratitude 
with our penitence, we need also to approach him 
with deprecation, lest in the very hour of his 
visitation we offend him afresh. 

I said at the outset that as a nation we were 
drifting away from God and forgetting his name 
and titles. But there is one way and a very 
horrible way in which that name and those titles 
are increasingly familiar. We were profane 
enough as a people before the war, but there is 
reason to fear that this vice has grown upon us in 
the camp and the field. Young men seem to 
celebrate their enfranchisement from the quiet 
order and soft but powerful restraints of home life 

3 



18 

by giving license to their tongues. In the presence 
of a mother or a sister or in the parlor of a friend 
there are many considerations beside reverence 
that would control their speech. But, cut adrift 
from these ties and scenes, entering upon a fellow- 
ship where it seems bold and free and generous to 
despise all the petty tyrannies left behind, it carries 
with it a sort of argument for one's daring and man- 
hood to be audacious with the name of God. Where 
lip lends the contagion to lip, and official standing 
graces the practice, profanity becomes with too 
many easy and habitual. You shall hear it from 
well nigh every tent. It is the undertone of the 
march. It mingles with mirth and points every 
jest. Returned soldiers announce themselves not 
more by their uniform than by the blasphemies 
with which they fairly blacken the air. I have no 
doubt it is dimly present to their consciousness, 
that such language, as they come back from the 
war, argues them to have seen strange, wild and 
desperate experiences, and breathes the aroma of 
a life as far as possible from the quiet scenes into 
which they return. 

Alas, that when we want God most, and that 
they whose constant exposure to sudden and violent 
death makes their need so imminent of that divine 
care and mercy, we and they should so affront him. 
Ah, to meet that volume of profanity and outweigh 
it, we need to double to-day our volume of prayer. 
While they desecrate in profane daring — we must 
hallow in fervent supplication that holy and fearful 
name. 



19 

We shall need also to watch and pray lest lying 
become a vice of this land. We have had no very 
sharp general test of our national veracity hitherto. 
In our commercial dealings — man with man — we 
have been as honest and candid, I suppose, as 
buyers and sellers, in any of the markets of the 
earth. If a man be tricky and false in these more 
private relations, he is soon known and marked, 
and finds that honesty is not only the best principle 
but according to the proverb, the best policy. But 
it would seem as though the moment we come to 
act in relation to the Government and the law of the 
land, that lying and stealing changed their moral 
quality. Let a draft summon our young men 
and our strong men to replenish the thinned ranks 
of the army. Alas, how decrepid our young men, 
how infirm our strong men ! What awful deformi- 
ties, what hideous bodily defects, what incurable 
maladies have been covered up all along by decent 
broadcloth ! Our churches on the Sabbath, our 
drawing rooms on assembly nights, our exchange 
at noonday, have been filled with ghastly hospital 
patients, and we never guessed it. How much 
false bloom there must be on the cheek, how much 
feigned vigor in the step — what a forced cheerful- 
ness in voice and laugh — what heroic, uncomplain- 
ing, smiling martyrs to pain in the pleasant festivities 
and eager industries of all daily life ! Who would 
have guessed that our mothers had borne and our 
homes had reared such a race of cripples, and that 
the symmetry and soundness of American manhood 
were, to such a fearful extent, starch and buckram ! 



20 

Taxes have been easy under the light expendi- 
tures of an economical Government — and for the 
most part frankly and cheerfully met. They are 
another sort of burden now — and how suddenly 
our handsome establishments show hollow and un- 
substantial ! How basely alloyed is our most showy 
and solid service of silver ! " How is the ffold 
become dim — how is the most fine n^old changed ! " 
How cheap and frail the chariots of state, and 
what a false value the glittering trappings put upon 
mean and sorry steeds ! What marvellous secrets 
of domestic econom.y some households possess that 
can live like princes on a peasant's income ! 

Are these all the fairness, manliness and truth 
there are in American life ? Are the days of 
drafting and of heavy taxes to unearth such a mul- 
titude of shirking, shuffling, we may as well say 
it, lying cowards ? 

Are we to compete with one another now under 
the new burdens, to see who can be most expert in 
shaving a lie without running it plump down, and 
develop in the same demonstration both the mean- 
ness of unpatriotic parsimony, and the moral crime 
of sacrificing truth to the pocket \ If this is to be 
the new style of national progress, is it a strenuous 
plea with God to spare us and give us victory and 
length of days ? 

We have a proverb in spiritual things that " man's 
extremity is God's opportunity" — illustrating the 
truth that often in our utmost need, God's goodness 
comes in with its most prized and timely succors. 
We have got a new second clause to that proverb, 



21 

" Man's extremity is the speculator's opportunity." 
If speculators would operate only among them- 
selves, and with the false values Avhich they create 
and build up, ensnaring and devouring one another, 
it would be no man's concern, except to look 
thankfully on, and devoutly hope that the issue 
might be like that of the famous Kilkenny duel. 
Let Greek meet Greek, and sharper prey upon 
sharper. But when they enter into combination, 
in times of enhanced prices, when whole commu- 
nities of families with fixed and limited incomes 
are struggling hard to secure the necessaries of 
life, and, using large capital, buy up these articles 
of most common and needed consumption for the 
sake of creating a scarcity, and through the 
scarcity a demand, and as the final eff"ect to double 
their investment, adding to all the burdens of 
war time, increased taxation and absence of 
strong productive hands, this gratuitous, most 
mercenary and most selfish burden of paying a 
hundred per cent out of a soldier's earnings and 
savings — the sole dependence of many a home for 
the necessaries of life — into their itching palms, 
one is tempted to wish that in the absence of laws 
to reach and punish such a crime, the whole 
indignant community would rise up, and extempo- 
rizing stakes and faggots — beams and ropes, teach 
these marble-hearted miscreants, that though legal 
Justice is blind and dumb over their guilt, natural 
Justice will put an end to their trade and to them. 
What do we think of wreckers, who show false 
lights in dangerous seas, to lure some goodly ship 



22 

to destruction, that they may gorge the plunder — or 
the harpies that cluster on a battle field at night, 
witl; lantern and dagger, and first stab and then 
strip the wounded ] How much worse are they 
than the sleek dealers who doom impoverished 
families to the slow miseries of want and famine 
that they may clutch out of such hands a larger 
profit I We have not law for such criminals, we 
dare not take the law into our own hands — that 
were neither wise nor right. We want God for 
them. AVe want to say as archangel Michael said 
to their prototype and father, " The Lord rebuke 
thee!" We want such a public sense of an 
Almighty presence and power — such a universal 
faith in the fatherhood of God toward men, that this 
fratricidal wrong shall no more dare to lift its head. 
From this sin flows very naturally another — the 
sin of public extravagance, though the stream is 
broader and more copious than the fountain. It is 
the lavish outlay of so many with whom money is 
plenty, that helps to drain the land of gold — that 
keeps up the price of gold — that makes the enor- 
mous inflation of a paper currency inevitable — that 
enhances all prices — that thus oppresses the poor 
and drags the country into the ever deepening 
abyss of public debt — and is preparing and hasten- 
ing that revulsion that must come — that will be 
here sooner or later, when thousands of fortunes 
great and small will suff"er wreck. Let men whose 
means seem ample, reduce instead of enlarging 
their personal expenditures. Let ladies, who think 
they can aflord to live elegantly, set the example of 



23 

satisfying their taste so far as possible with home 
products ; let every man who finds his hands un- 
expectedly full, lay by now for that " ivet day " 
coming, when the sun of our transient and seeming 
prosperity shall be suffering disastrous eclipse ; 
especially if we part freely with our means let us 
give to charity and lend to the Lord, and that 
clouded day ahead and not far off will not be so 
utterly dark. What we want as an antidote to this 
evil and peril is nothing less or other than a sense 
of our stewardship under God. 

With such deprecation of evils existing and 
threatening we are finally to hear God's call in the 
country's. This land was planted for him; this 
nation founded for him. If it be saved, it is to be 
saved for him — or our salvation will be only the 
precursor of deeper ruin. We have two things to 
do as Christian patriots, to save the laud and to 
save it for God. It is his call then that summons 
our young men to the field. For the land is to be 
saved not by such blasts of night as doomed 
Sennacherib and his host, when 

" The might of the Gentile unsmote by the sword 
Melted like snow in the glance of the Lord," 

but by arms of flesh and valiant hearts with God's 
blessing upon their human prowess. We may 
turn a deaf ear to proclamations and muster calls, 
and escape with such impunity as we can win. 
But God has committed this land and its great 
venture for humanity to our faithful keeping, and 
He summons us to the front to take part in that 
stern debate of arms, whose issue is to decide 



•i4 

Avhethcr ^ve live or die. Oh such a call, so solemn, so 
sacred, with the accents of such voices blending in 
it, — God's and the country's, our homes, and our 
future, and our kjnd — iiaver before addressed itself 
to youthful valor and patriotic and pious ardor — 
making recusancy, except under the inexorable 
ban of necessity, the denial of manhood, disloyalty 
to native land, and treason to God. 

But it is not enough that we are loyal and 
valiant. It is only half our task to save the land. 
It is to be saved for God. It is to be saved in the 
interest of Freedom, Humanity and Righteousness. 
It is to be saved for God's great purpose of using 
us as a regenerated people to show forth the beauty 
and fairness of a Christian state to a gazing and 
hitherto reproachful world. If we conquer in the 
war but fail in the moral struggle — and drag this 
nation clinging to her old sin and shame and curse 
back into that same old controversy with God, 
which has culminated in this day of calamity, 
(iod w^ill teach us his meaning in a. more impres- 
sive May, and woe to our head when the next 
lesson comes. 

Let us clasp it in our arms to-day, our whole 
bleeding country, faith and prayer locking their 
embrace around it, and lift it out of the dust and 
smoke of party strife and civil war, and with one 
wide-consenting vow of consecration, lay it down 
at the feet that were wounded, to be henceforth 
Immanuel's land, and ourselves servants of the 
Most High (iod. 



\_^ 



.IBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 028 234 7 



